Play Fallout Shelter on Windows and Mac

Heyo Nerdites! I want­ed to stop in with a quick­er hit to drop a lit­tle bit of knowl­edge for those who may not be in the know. Fallout Shelter was re­leased to­day for Android OS (Finally!), and with it comes the abil­i­ty to play this ti­tle on your PC!While Fallout Shelter is out — na­tive­ly — for iOS and Android, you now have the abil­i­ty to play it on your desk­top or lap­top via Android on so­lu­tions for PC like Andyroid or BlueStacks. I’ll go a lit­tle into each pro­gram and some of the pros and cons for these two ap­pli­ca­tions and give you a bit of video of Fallout Shelter in ac­tion on Windows! Android Authority has a more in­for­ma­tion on the dif­fer­ences be­tween the two here.

Shut up and take my bottlecaps!

Thankfully you will not be need­ing to shell out pre­cious bot­tle­caps to use ei­ther of these pro­grams. While both of­fer more enterprise/developer fo­cused paid sub­scrip­tion mod­els, each of­fers a full fledged ver­sion of the pro­gram free of charge for your en­joy­ment.

Whether BlueStacks or Andyroid is bet­ter for you will large­ly de­pend on your per­son­al user ex­pe­ri­ence and fea­tures that you may want. The one no­tice­able con goes into the BlueStacks col­umn right away, though, as part of their free prod­uct in­volves down­load­ing “fea­tured” apps as a way to pay their bills. This comes off a lit­tle iffy to me per­son­al­ly, but they do have to pay the bills and I have been able to back out of these down­loads eas­i­ly enough. Andyroid does show “fea­tured” apps to you, but they are nev­er au­to­mat­i­cal­ly down­loaded.

There is also a no­tice­able pro in Andyroid’s fa­vor in the abil­i­ty to use your phone as a re­mote con­troller for the ac­tion on the PC side. Both pro­grams of­fer gamepad sup­port, but the abil­i­ty to use your phone as a con­troller does give Andyroid a slight head start com­ing out of the fea­tures gate.

Suit up and roll out

Andyroid Homescreen

Bluestacks Homescreen

Installation is fair­ly straight for­ward in both pro­grams. While BlueStacks will just “work” on most sys­tems, there is a caveat and an­oth­er pro for Andyroid in that it takes ad­van­tage of vir­tu­al­iza­tion (it runs on Orcale’s Virtual Box) on mod­ern CPUs — and thus the fea­ture needs to be en­abled in your BIOS. This is great to me, as it in­fers bet­ter over­all per­for­mance on the part of Andyroid. But if the Andyroid in­staller dings you for not hav­ing Virtualization en­abled in your BIOS, and these words make you not even want to both­er, then just go ahead and roll with BlueStacks.

BlueStacks is no fuss so­lu­tion. But when it comes to side by side com­par­isons, Andyroid had the bet­ter per­for­mance over­all for Fallout Shelter on my side.

These so­lu­tions for run­ning Android on your PC are use­ful for more than just Fallout Shelter too. If you were want­i­ng to work more gen­er­al­ly with Android apps on your com­put­er, in­clud­ing things like pro­duc­tiv­i­ty apps, then I would have to sug­gest Andyroid. It scores high­er in this area too due to us­ing a more up­dat­ed ver­sion of Android OS than BlueStacks does, and just gen­er­al­ly be­ing bet­ter for over­all app use. Bluestacks looks to have more of a fo­cus on just gam­ing.

Sim-Shelter

When it comes to the game it­self, I’ve been toy­ing with it for the past hour be­fore launch­ing into this ar­ti­cle. It’s en­ter­tain­ing so far at least! I can’t launch into a re­view yet, as I’m only just now get­ting to play the game. I’m re­mind­ed of games SimTower or the parred down mo­bile games like Tiny Tower from Mobage, but with more depth for sure.

There are IAP in this game, but just like they said at E3 2015, none of it is need­ed to ac­cess any of the fea­tures of the game. You pay for “lunch­box­es” which give you ran­dom­ized cards that un­lock loot to equip on your shel­ter denizens and re­sources, but you can also gain these through in game ac­tiv­i­ties.

I’ll like­ly launch into our first ever mo­bile game re­view af­ter I have been able to spend more time with this ti­tle; but frankly, I need way more time with this game to say whether it’s worth your time.

At least that’s all it will cost, if you choose. Whether you play it on iOS, Android, or Android on PC, you can now play Fallout Shelter on dang near every­thing now.

Josh has worked in IT for over 15 years. Graduated Broadcasting school in 2012 with a fo­cus on A/V pro­duc­tion. Amateur pho­tog­ra­ph­er with a pas­sion to make things work… by any means nec­es­sary. Editor-in-Chief and do-er of tech things at SuperNerdLand